Unhealthy management of personal boundaries not only makes life tougher, but can often invite predatory people into your world. It’s not a pleasant experience, but it is something you have to do for your mental health as an adult. Your boundaries have to both be flexible enough to let you survive and rigid enough to keep you from being miserable.

It’s pretty much a fact of human existence that not only will you have to deal with challenging, broken people, but that as an adult, you may not have the option to avoid them. The point of this is recognizing that there are very few people who start off as intolerable jerks, but there are lots of people who end up that way as a result of circumstance.